Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Mary Oliver

 

I was at a house-concert last night: Peter hunt & Band (Conor Alexander, Linden Lester, and Marcelo Bonin) . The event was the culmination of a wonderful all-ranging creative weekend with Monica O’Brien and Gina Ogilvie of Willow Publishing (thank you:)).

A house concert is a concept I only met when I moved to Australia: quality music in someone’s home: more than an Irish singsong (which can be great!), more intimate and shared than a small venue can manage…a remnant, perhaps, from times before celebrity culture? The music was new to me, and exceptional. Peter and the band inhabit their music-making in ways that allowed us to come in to rest, and stretch, and be stretched.  Have a listen. A graced end to a Sunday…

It led me to places I would call conversional: to see, feel, experience that kind of musical expertise and interaction combined with the freedom to name things gently and open them to others does something to one’s soul. For me it’s a direct challenge to who I am and who I…and God perhaps?… want me to be. “Who are you?” This is not (only) because I am a musician and music can get sidelined in the line of cares a day holds…but also, I think, about the creative possibilities of a life, and how that side of who we are leads, or does not lead, the work (and play) through which we become ourselves in this world. Who are you? What do you long to do?

I do many things, some of them important – at least to someone – a few of them life-altering. A number of them could easily be done by someone else.  In how many of them am I fully present, fully alive, fully inhabiting the moment? How does the gift of opening creative spaces (through music, prayer, words spoken or written….) colour my choices, small and large, each day? I find myself challenged, invited, or rather simply inhabiting an inner home inside myself that someone else opened for me, asking these questions…